Jonathan Kay: Netanyahu's pride-swallowing apology is a service to Israel

Netanyahu's pride-swallowing apology is a service to Israel

Barack Obama’s trip to the Middle East isn’t over yet. But already, it has been so successful that no less a critic than Commentary Magazine’s Jonathan Tobin — who spent Obama’s first term assailing the President’s allegedly Jimmy Carteresque take on the Middle East — is fundamentally reassessing his opinion.

“One thing has undoubtedly changed in the aftermath of the presidential visit to Israel: Barack Obama’s image as an antagonist of the Jewish state,” Tobin wrote yesterday on the Commentary web site. “In terms of his attitude toward Israel, in the past three days Obama has altered his status in that regard from being the second coming of Jimmy Carter to that of another Bill Clinton … After the stirring Zionist rhetoric uttered by the president during his stay in the Jewish state, it’s simply no longer possible for his opponents to brand him as a foe of Israel or as someone who is unsympathetic to its plight. Though his appeals for peace were addressed to the wrong side of the conflict, it just isn’t possible to ask any American president to have said more.”

And it gets better. Tobin wrote his Friday blog post simply on the basis of Obama’s rhetoric. In a stunning development that was reported just hours later, Obama stage-managed a phone call from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in which the Israeli PM delivered a long-sought apology for Israel’s conduct of a deadly 2010 raid against a ship carrying Turkish activists seeking to break Israel’s Gaza embargo.

There are huge practical military and economic benefits to be had, on both sides, by a resumption of the Israeli-Turkish alliance.

While Netanyahu (correctly) has defended Israel’s right to ensure Hamas terrorists sworn to Israel’s destruction cannot have unfettered nautical access to the world’s weapons bazaar, it is common knowledge — in Israel and everywhere else — that the planning for the 2010 raid was botched. Netanyahu’s refusal to apologize until now was mostly a matter of his own stubbornness. There are huge practical military and economic benefits to be had, on both sides, by a resumption of the Israeli-Turkish alliance. And it was long past time that Netanyahu mended fences. Standing on principle allowed Netanyahu to strike a noble pose for a while. But with Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah in the implacable-enemy category; and Syria, Lebanon and even Egypt all destabilized, Israel needs dependable regional allies. Netanyahu’s pride-swallowing routine therefore was a great service to his nation.

As for Obama, he continues to stymie the critics who claimed he was a spineless naïf on the world stage. He hasn’t yet brought peace to the Middle East or destroyed Iran’s nuclear program. But his sheer perseverance on the Israel-Turkey file, combined with his (much mocked) faith in diplomacy and human rationality, has brought together two feuding American allies, and produced a win-win-win for all three nations.

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